With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 - Hardcover

Graubart, Karen B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804753555 ISBN 13: 9780804753555

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2007

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Based upon substantial new research, this book investigates the heterogeneity of experiences of rural and urban indigenous women in early colonial Peru, from the massive changes in their working lives, to their utilization of colonial law to seek redress, to their creation of urban dress styles that reflected their new positions as consumers and as producers under Spanish rule.

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Karen B. Graubart is Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Cornell University.

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Based upon substantial new research, this book investigates the heterogeneity of experiences of rural and urban indigenous women in Peru during the first two centuries of Spanish colonization. Using wills, as well as other notarial and legal documents, it discusses changes in their working lives and how their identity as “Indians” as well as women was shaped in a multicultural society. From their utilization of colonial law to seek redress, to their creation of urban dress styles that reflected their new positions as consumers and as producers under Spanish rule, the early colonial period witnessed a dramatic upheaval in indigenous women's lives. By analyzing the migration from rural to urban areas, interaction with Spanish as well as African society, and the lives of both plebeians and elites, the author provides a thorough picture of this transformational period.

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Based upon substantial new research, this book investigates the heterogeneity of experiences of rural and urban indigenous women in Peru during the first two centuries of Spanish colonization. Using wills, as well as other notarial and legal documents, it discusses changes in their working lives and how their identity as Indians as well as women was shaped in a multicultural society. From their utilization of colonial law to seek redress, to their creation of urban dress styles that reflected their new positions as consumers and as producers under Spanish rule, the early colonial period witnessed a dramatic upheaval in indigenous women's lives. By analyzing the migration from rural to urban areas, interaction with Spanish as well as African society, and the lives of both plebeians and elites, the author provides a thorough picture of this transformational period.

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With Our Labor and Sweat

Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700By KAREN B. GRAUBART

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5355-5

Contents

Maps, Tables, and Figures.........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...................................................................................................xiIntroduction......................................................................................................11. La ropa de la tierra: Indigenous Women and the Tributary Economy of Early Colonial Peru........................272. "With Our Labor and Sweat": Creating the Urban Economy.........................................................603. "Because I am a woman and very old ...": Indigenous Women's Testaments as Legal Strategies.....................954. Dressing Like an Indian: Producing Ethnicity in Urban Peru.....................................................1215. "Use and Custom": Cacicas and the Invention of Political Tradition in Colonial Peru............................158Conclusion: Gender, Ethnicity, and Other Identities in Early Colonial Peru........................................186Notes.............................................................................................................197Bibliography......................................................................................................223Index.............................................................................................................237

Chapter One

La ropa de la tierra: Indigenous Women and the Tributary Economy of Early Colonial Peru

Introduction

In 1567, some thirty-five years after the first Spaniards arrived in Peru, the colonial inspector Garci Dez de San Miguel traveled to the southern highland province of Chucuito to investigate tribute payment and economic relations in the communities of the Lupaqa Indians. One of his informants, the judge Bernaldino Fasato, spoke about the current system for producing handwoven wool cloth for the market. He recounted how a group of "elderly Indian women" had come to him in his official capacity, complaining that "[their caciques] ordered them to spin wool for cloth and had not paid them anything for that." Upon further investigation Fasato learned that the caciques, who were commissioned for this purpose by merchants and other colonists, had fed the women while they worked, but had indeed failed to pay them any wages; in fact, the Lupaqa caciques had customarily kept, on behalf of the community, all the cash paid them by Spanish officials for all such enterprises, which must have totaled thousands of pesos annually.

In the summary of his findings, Dez exclaimed that "[the caciques] have collected the money and have not given a thing to the Indians, they have spent it all on works for the church and ornaments and having seen the works as sumptuous as they have made them, it seems to me that they have pretty much spent it all, although I have enough suspicion that they have kept some money for themselves."

Spanish officials heading up the investigation, called a visita, fixated upon the potential scandal of caciques commandeering the income from this putting-out system. But the records from the visita offer us much more than insight into early colonial corruption. Through pages of testimony taken from local notables over a ten-month period, including Spanish officials like Fasato, as well as scribes and merchants and the caciques themselves, the Chucuito visita presents a variety of perspectives on the local experience of colonization in a small, rural community in the highlands.

From the perspective of examining a gendered history, what stands out from Fasato's testimony is that a group of "elderly Indian women" had approached that colonial official to complain that their cacique withheld their pay. This suggests a transformation of Andean social relations: not only were Indian women participating in what they believed to be a wage-labor relationship, but they now considered the colonial authorities either parallel to, or more effective than, their caciques in questions of local governance.

In fact, the system set up by the caciques was on its face consonant with prehispanic practice in the highlands. Caciques commonly "requested" labor from their subjects, including tasks such as spinning and weaving, and gave the workers food and drink during their period of employment. This cloth was then "spent" in religious and political practices, including ritual burning and clothing the Inca elites and the army. But in the thirty-odd years since the Spaniards had replaced the Incas as the imperial power in the southern highlands, expectations about proper norms for production, distribution, and consumption had been radically altered. Rather than expecting food and drink as part of a system of reciprocity, workers demanded wages from caciques as compensation for their labor. And when they could not resolve disputes within the community, they took their complaints to the colonial authorities. The fact that this particular complaint was made by a group of elderly women indicates that it was not only men, but also women who were being challenged by migration patterns, access to paid labor, and the predations of the consumer economy that Spain hoped to impress upon its new subjects.

Although the extraction of precious metals and minerals was the most immediate economic goal of the colonization of the New World, the reality of economic relations was more far-reaching and complex. Spanish conquistadors initially collected all the booty they could find, and many did return to Spain wealthy. But many more stayed, influential in the creation of a flexible and dynamic economic sector, not only of encomiendas-grants of indigenous labor to produce commodities according to practices overseen by native chiefs-but also of artisans, agriculture, and markets, both regional and international.

The colony's domestic economy in the early years involved, in areas without direct access to gold and silver mines, the redistribution of commodities produced by indigenous communities, now for the profit of these colonists. Of these local products, produced by skilled artisans as well as the general population for their own use, the most important and ubiquitous commodities by far-both to the Spaniards and to native peoples-were rectangular blocks of woven cloth made of cotton and wool, known as la ropa de la tierra, "native clothing," by the Spaniards who eagerly bought and sold it. That the trade in indigenous cloth was extensive and lucrative is well known to historians of Peru: Jorge Zevallos Quiones wrote in 1973 of the "prize" of la ropa tributo, the tribute in clothing, awarded by Pizarro to his colleagues at the founding of Trujillo. But what should be emphasized in a retelling of economic relations in the early colonial period is the extent to which handwoven cloth production created direct links between rural and urban centers; enriched merchants who realized that there would be a market for rural production in the new urban and mining centers; and changed productive relations, including gendered relations, in the rural communities that produced this homespun clothing.

Studies of the colonial Andes have long debated the extent to which native communities were "destructurated," in Wachtel's polarizing term, or resisted or accommodated the demands of Spanish colonialism. Regional studies like those of Spalding, Ramrez, and Powers, among others, have demonstrated the extent to which native elites, pulled in so many directions by the contradictory demands of colonial officials as well as their own subjects, adapted their practices such that the most successful became important power brokers in the colonial political economy. Using these studies as context, I take the analysis to a "micro" level to historicize how households, individuals, and in particular, women, might have experienced what Stern has termed the "challenge of colonialism" just a few generations after the first contact. And, to move us beyond the urban-rural dichotomy and into the content of the chapters to follow, I will explore rural productive relations as part of the context for the exodus to the cities by indigenous women and men, and as a catalyst for urban market relations.

This chapter, then, looks at some of the ways that rural (and by implication, urban) society was being transformed by colonial economic and social relations by examining testimony in a series of visitas. The gender transformations we will see are evidence of just how deep some of these changes were: the fabric of community life for men, women, and children was affected by colonial economic relations, though it was clearly not destroyed, nor did these changes augur ill for everyone concerned or occur evenly across regions. The gendered reorganization of labor in the colonial period had a profound effect upon social relations in rural areas. Without falling into the trap of assuming that a total, cataclysmic break took place in 1532, we do need to question the effects of not only the tributary economy but also mercantile pressures upon relations at the level of the community and the family.

Rural communities in the middle of the sixteenth century were involved in all sorts of businesses. While the Lupaqa, because of their proximity to the mining center of Potos, may have developed their economic networks more rapidly than remoter communities, their activities may serve as an overview of the tratos y granjeras available: farming; hunting; cattle raising (including European species as well as llamas); coca production; weaving and spinning; hauling merchandise (coca, cattle, woven goods) to the mines of Potos and to the cities of Arequipa and Cuzco; and artisanry, such as silversmithing, ceramics, and construction. These activities were sometimes organized by individuals or local groups, who "exchanged" cattle, charqui (freeze-dried meat) and wool for corn in various high- and lowland cities, and sometimes through Spaniards, who hired them for money and in-kind wages to haul commodities long distances or, as we have seen, to weave large quantities of clothing.

We cannot tell from the numerous short testimonies of the visita exactly the nature of the social order in which all these exchanges and activities were embedded, nor the degree to which any of them represented a serious break with prehispanic practices, except for the obvious introduction of European commodities, plants, and animals, and especially the introduction of large-scale credit, which concerned the authorities greatly. But the testimony, especially about the weaving operations, made it clear that social relations were changing even in rural regions, and plebeians as well as caciques had new expectations about their work roles as well as the appropriate forms remuneration would take.

Rural indigenous women and men were incorporated into the colonial economy with what could be described as both "pushes" and "pulls." Merchants, bureaucrats, and church officials, as well as their own caciques, encouraged or required them to produce food, cloth, and other commodities for market as well as for tribute. But Indian laborers themselves were learning of alternative arrangements, either through their own experiences or from relatives who had moved to the new urban centers. Communities shifted to meet the new demands of caciques as well as Europeans, and learned to deal with the demographic crisis and patterns of migration that left many communities with a significantly larger female than male population toward the end of the sixteenth century. This chapter investigates the transformation of rural society, particularly the ways in which indigenous women engaged with and shaped the colonial economy at its very birth.

Colonial Dislocations and the Gender of Weavers

Peru's colonial economy was constructed in contestation: the relations of production and consumption that developed were the result of ongoing small and large conflicts between social and ethnic groups and not the simple triumph of one system over another. One arena for contestation was the gender division of labor, the social order that normalizes men's and women's productive roles. In the Andes, the division of labor was deeply transformed by demographic crisis and by the organization of the encomienda and market economies. The normalization of these new relations meant that rural Andean women, identified by the state mainly as weavers, mothers, and agricultural workers, became invisible historical actors, while rural men, assumed to be the tributaries, mitayos and wage workers, were taken to be the main agents of colonial economic relations.

More recently, historians have sought to complicate this picture by including gender in their analyses, though their interventions have most often come in studies of urban economies. As Ann Zulawski has argued, it is "artificial" to study Indian women apart from Indian men, and likewise rural society without attention to the family economy. And attention to gender as a central constituent of the economy reveals the dynamism of cultural contact in this period, as it also recognizes the complexity of women's economic contributions and responses to colonization. As colonial economic demands indeed brought more indigenous men out of rural communities to mining regions, large agricultural enterprises, and urban centers, indigenous women were sometimes compelled and other times found it advantageous to produce cloth and other market commodities for a rising class of Spanish middlemen and -women.

Spanish chroniclers-often conquistadors or otherwise participants in the conquest-went to great lengths to document the work habits of the peoples who were to become their labor force. Some were particularly taken by the strange propensities for men to perform "female" labor, or vice-versa. Although men in early modern Spain, as in much of Europe, wove textiles, they were usually high-status artisans, often members of a guild, and had the possibility of becoming a master artisan or at least self-employed. European women, on the other hand, were encouraged to sew, spin, and weave within the setting of the home, either for family use or to supplement family income. Although women did perform this labor in other settings-most famously in the silk-weaving industry, whereby "the kingdom of Seville is kept rich by the women," according to a contemporary report-they were usually restricted in terms of earnings and worked in a putting-out or a workshop system where they experienced little occupational mobility or independence.

Thus some Spanish chroniclers, like the Jesuit Fray Bernab Cobo, interpreted the division of labor in conquest-era Peru as inverted, where women "do most of the work, because, besides bringing up the children, they cook, make chicha [corn beer] and all the clothing they, their husbands and their children wear, and they do even more work in the fields than the men." Although we should not dismiss the rhetorical aspects of this description-turning indigenous males into lazy savages (or feminized sodomites) was part of a political agenda aimed at legitimating the conquest rather than producing accurate ethnographic texts-the gendered complementarity of labor in the prehispanic Andes required that women work alongside men in many tasks.

In fact, many early colonial sources indicate that agriculture was indeed joint labor: informants of the 1567 visita of Chucuito stated explicitly that men and women both grew the crops for their cacique's salary, and a 1562 visita of Hunuco gives additional broad support for this view. But Spanish policy insisted upon adult males as the nominal producers of the surplus they collected in the colony. Thus census rolls tended to name only adult men, and the informational questions that administrators asked during periodic visitas were directed toward the male "head of household." Although there are clear indications that informants understood and spoke to their interlocutors of the importance of female labor to most productive tasks, the documents themselves are structured so as to negate that perception.

As a result, colonial law-which emanated from Spain or from urban viceregal capitals like Lima, rather than centers of agricultural production like Chucuito or Hunuco-was drawn to support the fiction that indigenous men were the agents of production in the colonial world. But law had a limited reach in colonial Peru. The productive capacity of Indian women did not escape the notice of Spanish encomenderos, merchants, and other elites, who quickly grasped the importance of this labor force. As a result, indigenous women and men both came to occupy new social and economic roles in the early years of colonization.

The lack of alphabetic writing before Spaniards came to the Andes and the relative scarcity of relevant prehispanic iconographic materials means that we have little concrete information about the gender divisions of labor that existed prior to the European conquest. By the era of the first visitas containing ethnographic material on labor practices, the 1560s, practices may already have changed due to European contact and local demands, and Spanish chronicles are not always reliable on this topic. But as evidenced by the numerous surviving textiles as well as spinning implements and looms in archaeological sites, weaving and spinning were both common and socially important activities, in more ancient periods as well as under Inca domination in the fifteenth century.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from With Our Labor and Sweatby KAREN B. GRAUBART Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804753555
• ISBN 13: 9780804753555
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar